It appears that on November 19, 2025 the HHS Secretary RFK, Jr directed the CDC to change its website to suggest that, contrary to all prior statements, medical science has not, in fact, clearly demonstrated that there is no link between vaccines and autism. He said that important evidence had been ignored and that HHS was launching a new initiative to investigate.
The medical community was shocked. Over 40 different professional organizations condemned the move, together with the autism advocacy movement.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has been changed to promote false information suggesting vaccines cause autism,” said Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement. “Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism.”
This move is particularly frightening now as we are experiencing the largest outbreak of measles the US has experienced in 25 years, a fact that can be traced directly to decreased uptake of the MMR vaccine. That’s the one that Andrew Wakefield claimed was linked to autism back in 1998 in a paper that was later retracted when it was found to be based on flawed and falsified data.
If you are interested in how we know that vaccines do not cause autism, there is no need to recreate the wheel. Here are a number of excellent resources we are happy to share:
Paul Offit has a nice video giving a brief overview of the research. For a deeper look, the Vaccine Education Center at CHOP, which he runs, has a page that discusses some of the important studies in this area with links to many actual papers, if you would wish to read them for yourself.
For a REALLY deep dive into the research surrounding this paper, The Logic of Science website has a review of over a hundred different papers on this subject, analyzing the quality of the evidence on both sides and demonstrating clearly why the high quality evidence overwhelmingly points to there being no linkage between vaccine and autism. Although many internet sites will have references that vaccine opponents will point too, when you examine those references the results can be pretty disappointing.
Partly, though, this is a fundamental debate about science, what it can do and how it can answer questions. When the HHS secretary claims that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” he is making a fundamentally unscientific claim. No study will ever be able to “rule out” such a possibility, because that’s not how studies work. You can’t prove a lack of association. As one writer has pointed out, you might as well ask if we have conclusively proven that dogs don’t cause autism. Science works with testable ideas which can generate predictions. Then we look to see if the predictions are true. If vaccines were causing autism, you ought to be able to look at a 1000 vaccinated kids and 1000 matched unvaccinated kids and find more autism in the vaccinated group. But you don’t find that. And that fact has been demonstrated over and over, in giant studies across 3 continents. That’s how we know the two things are not connected.
At a certain point, you have to wonder if people cannot be convinced by overwhelming evidence because they do not wish to convinced. Wakefield, for example, prior to publishing his paper filed for a series of patents for stand alone vaccines and diagnostics which would only be valuable if the MMR vaccine was withdrawn. Is it a surprise, then, that he found “evidence” of just that? The new CDC website page touts a new “comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism” headed up my a man named David Geier, a man with a history of practicing medicine without a license and fraudulantly charging families $5000/month for unproven autism therapies like Lupron. If you are looking to bring real evidence to the table that will shed new light on something studied so comprehensively as the question of vaccines and autism, it is hard to believe Mr. Geier is the man you would hire. If, on the other hand, you were looking to manufacture support for a conclusion already drawn… he might just be the man for the job.